Getting Started with KendoUI

Author: David J McClelland

18Dec

KendoUI is the pick to replace Flash at the office. We looked at several competing frameworks and Kendo seems the most polished and maintainable one out there. It is built over jQuery and seems to play nice with CSS and HTML5. It has almost all the UI controls Flex offers. Binding data to controls via MVVM declarative object instantiation. So far so good.

Now I am starting to dig in and try to do actual things with Kendo that we are used to doing with Flex. This is turning out to not be as trivial as advertised. I tend to get lost easily when working with frameworks that are trying to make development simple. Because it isn’t.

To start with we are moving away from using XML and replacing it with JSON. Our server application is supposed to support it. But it doesn’t really. It only supports JSON in certain ways on certain services. And then there is the complication that JSON will only work on pages hosted with the app server. I don’t run the app server on my dev box. My JSON is hosed. JSONP? Not supported.

So I am forced to upload a package to someone else’s instance of the app server to see if anything works at all, scrape the JSON returned via Charles, make a data.json file that I can read in my local web server, and then figure out why I can’t populate a beautiful blueberry style datagrid in a single line of code.

And within a week I am going to hear “Why isn’t this done yet? I thought this framework was a solid choice!”

Like this:

2 Responses for "Getting Started with KendoUI"

Why did you leave Flex? Apache Flex just graduated from incubation to full Apache project. to Do your clients dictate no Flash runtime, or are you just trying to future proof you work or what? Just curious.